Re: [Usability] Re: Suggestion for the actual UI of GTK+'s New FileSelector

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Fri, 2004-01-09 at 11:06, Sean Middleditch wrote:
>  If we want file-management in the dialog, just pop-up Nautilus
> and get rid of the dialog altogether.

I still believe Gnome should do this.
If it's too slow or uses too much memory, that should be fixed.  The
original file list dlog in the early UI systems was because there was
not enough performance to run a file manager and an application at the
same time, not enough screen size to drag between two windows, and
for the Mac, because of the decision to have only one active window.

The Sun/AT&T open look experiments with drag & drop were successful at
the time - UI studies they did seemed to show that users liked being
able to drag files from the desktop into applications without having
to bother with File->Open.  However, an "affordance" was needed to
give them a clue that this could be done.  Programs had a "drop target"
where you could drop documents to have them be opened.  This seemed
to work well.  When active, the drop target could also be used as
a drag target to save, print, view,compile (or whatever) the current
document by dragging from the target.

We're in danger of falling into the trap of following Microsoft when
Microsoft itself is moving... in a couple of years, Gnome will need
to compete effectively with Longhorn, and it won't do that by copying
Windows 95/98/NT for "familiarity".  The OSF made the same mistake by
copying the OS2 ver. 1.5 presentation manager for Motif, thinking it
would reduce training as pretty much everyone in the industry would
be using OS/2.  The moral is, don't be afraid to lead ;-)

Best,

Liam